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en"Essential Reading": A Review of Daniel Punday's Five Strands of Fictionalityhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/fictionspresent/institutional
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Anthony Warde</div>
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<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2011-03-12</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p class="longQuotation"><span class="lightEmphasis">Literature is a luxury; fiction is a necessity. -G. K. Chesterton</span></p>
<p>Chesterton’s wry remarks on Literature and fiction, and on their apparent distinction, serve as an apt summary not only of the various debates on literary tastes over the last century, but also of the changing emphases of certain critical theories more recently. While the notion of a stable canon of objectively great works of “Literature” has long been disputed (if not entirely dispelled), questions regarding the “necessity” of fiction, and the forms and functions of <span class="lightEmphasis">fictionality</span>, loom large in contemporary critical study. Regardless of its register or respectability, fiction is a mode of communication that is recognised as being distinct from, but by no means less necessary than, the more fundamental narrative logic that is held to order our understanding both of our individual lives and our purportedly common “History”. The increasing emphasis on the distinctive nature and function of fictional is reflected in the reorientation of critical fields which had previously regarded the question of fictionality as being of only minor concern. Narratology, to name one of the most prominent examples, has undergone a transformation over the last several decades from its “classical” guise, in which the distinction between fictional and non-fictional narrative either overlooked or downplayed, to a more interrogative mode which attempts to highlight and uphold the distinctiveness of these respective forms.<cite class="note" id="note_1">For an overview of narratology’s struggle to define fictionality in textual terms, see Prince (1991) and Cohn (1990).</cite> As Daniel Punday demonstrates in <span class="booktitle">Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of American Fiction</span>, however, the implications of authority, prestige and discretion which underpin the definition of “Literature”, although largely overlooked or obscured by more textual and formal approaches to narrative, are at the heart of contemporary articulations and analyses of fictionality.</p>
<p>While narratology attempts to define fictionality in terms of textual indices, Punday argues that it can be understood only contextually. Fictionality, in his view “is best defined by the operation of an institution that legitimises the creation of invented stories”; far from being an isolated topic of arcane academic debate, fictionality “reflects broad cultural issues that have special power in American literary culture” (16). Punday’s titular “five strands” provide him with a structuring motif for his survey of recent American fiction, in which he highlights “the contention between several different ways of legitimating the fictional, and that the contention between these strands marks a larger struggle between central and peripheral positions in regards to contemporary literature” (23). <cite class="note" id="note_2">Punday’s use of the term <span class="lightEmphasis">position</span> invokes Pierre Bourdieu’s work on institutions and, particularly, on the power that particular institutions assume as arbiters of artistic or literary quality (23).</cite> By characterising these various definitions of fictionality as “strands,” Punday also aims to emphasize the “interaction between different uses and groups operating within and outside of contemporary American literary culture” (26). This stance enables Punday to make a number of provocative remarks, such as his intriguing (and in my view compelling) claim that the postmodern age is more “fictional” than previous periods “not because we live in an age more suffused with entertainment and political spin”, but because “it represents a time when the institutions that justify knowledge and that organize disciplines for creating and disseminating that knowledge are especially subject to debate” (21).</p>
<p>Tracing his five definitions of fictionality in terms of their relationship to - and increasing distance from - “traditional literary institutions and practices” (26), Punday begins with the work of John Barth, building on the contention that “postmodern fiction in America has developed not in resistance to literary institutions but in the midst of them” (31). In an incisive reading of <span class="booktitle">The Friday Book</span>, Barth’s collection of literary essays, Punday demonstrates “how the concept of the fictional is made to do a certain kind of work that transforms the institutions from which this writing emerges” (33). More specifically, he argues that Barth’s career is marked by an attempt to resolve the question of the nature and purpose of fiction in contemporary writing, and that the author “finds this answer precisely in institutional frameworks like critical reviews and interviews with academic journals” (38). At the heart of Barth’s definition of postmodernist fictionality is <span class="lightEmphasis">myth</span>, a mode and model that not only embodies some qualities that we associate with postmodernism (“the interest in the relativity of knowledge, the problematization of history, the questioning of individuality”), but is also an established concept in literary institutions, as reflected in the works of Leslie Fiedler and Ihab Hassan (50). Punday argues, however, that the reformulation of myth in the works of later postmodern theorists means that the trope becomes “less a matter of the usefulness of made-up stories than a lens for reading culture”, and therefore cannot serve Barth’s successors as a means of reflecting on the specific problems and possibilities of fictionality.</p>
<p>Upon its apparent exhaustion as a method of understanding fictionality, myth is replaced in Punday’s survey by a second strand, namely, the definition of fiction as an <span class="lightEmphasis">archive</span>. While Barth’s reliance on critical reflection and his employment of a mythical mode apparently align him with literary institutions, the subjects Punday associates with this alternative form of fictionality, namely, Alice Walker and Andy Warhol, are viewed as attempting “to think about the use of the fictional that responds to the challenges of contemporary literary culture by looking outside of literary institutions for inspiration” (60). Unravelling Walker’s essays on Zora Neale Hurston, Punday proposes that the author’s pursuit of Hurston consists of two distinct narrative threads: an attempt to locate and mark Hurston’s grave; and an examination of the disappearance of Hurston’s writings from the literary canon, with the consequent call for a reassessment of her works (62). The former is a tale of misunderstanding, misappropriated identity and fabrication, on which Punday deftly draws to support his introductory characterisation of fiction as a form that revolves around “the idea of lying to get to the truth” (64). The latter story is one in which Walker’s (re)discovery of Hurston can be seen as “an exemplary act of archival foundation”, that is, the creation of an anchoring point “from which future work and thinking can be charted” (65). <cite class="note" id="note_3">The notion of the “archive” employed here is drawn from Jacques Derrida’s <span class="booktitle">Archive Fever</span>, where it is characterised as “a pledge, and like every <span class="lightEmphasis">pledge</span>, a token of the future” (Derrida 18; cited in Punday 65).</cite>By establishing an understanding of fictionality that emphasises futurity rather than dependence on the past, Walker not only challenges but circumvents “the traditional structure of canons and truth legitimation”, effectively neutralising the exclusionary forces that prompted her search (68).</p>
<p>Walker’s resistance to the disciplinary structures that endorse or exclude particular forms of knowledge is linked by Punday to Warhol’s work, which is characterised as providing “an alternative to the social conventions that usually define the value of art” (73). In place of “the language of ‘cultural capital,’ which accepts the aura as a principal value in artworlds,” Warhol, Punday argues, returns to “the principle of work”, that is, to “the very material nature of production” (73-4). This emphasis on materiality is also evident in Warhol’s employment of the “leftover”, objects and actions that are discarded or viewed as worthless. In Punday’s view, then, Walker and Warhol “rely on disorganized and neglected materials for new artistic work, and both must reject standard artistic practice whose rules dictate that these materials should be ignored” (81). From such marginal positions, however, both figures have been accepted (or appropriated) by their respective institutions “precisely because they so wholeheartedly criticized and in the process rejuvenated them” (60).</p>
<p>Punday’s third strand comprises writers who assume a position even further from the traditions and norms of literary institutions by defining fictionality as “a variety of lying” (87). In place of the simplistic and clichéd claim that “postmodernism is fascinated with lying because we have lost confidence in traditional notions of the truth”, Punday constructs a compelling case for viewing his highlighted authors’ appeals to lying as an index of their position “within a public sphere defined by the marketplace of publishing houses, small magazines, and university criticism” (88). From its early manifestation in the work of Howard Nemerov, whose term “fictive self” is construed as a Freudian-informed view of “the public nature of our private acts of fictional self-construction” (93), this strand of fictionality is traced through the novels of writers such as Gilbert Sorrentino and Steve Katz. The notion of fictionality as <span class="lightEmphasis">lying</span> is identified in the authors’ metafictional reflections on the struggles and restrictions of artistic creation, from the “conception” of characters who are both types and individuals (“both public and private, inherited and invented”) to the “spatial” exploration of the printed page and of the book as a whole (110). In Punday’s view, the self-referentiality of these works, far from signalling a solipsistic emphasis of the textual at the expense of the contextual, in fact serves to highlight the institutional forces that (attempt to) set the terms of their production; they are not “hyper-verbal” but “hyper-institutional, obsessively concerned with their own printing and page layout” (115). The notion of lying, then, highlights a tension between the integrity and independence of the fictional text, and its “responsibility” and susceptibility to the contexts in which it is produced.</p>
<p>From his fourth chapter, Punday charts a course away from the traditional literary institutions that inform the first three strands to understandings of fictionality that draw from other contexts, beginning with science fiction. While in a certain sense science fiction reflects a “classic definition” of fictionality as an investigative and instructive “act of creating and exploring worlds that function as logical alternatives to our own reality”, Punday focuses on cyberpunk, a variety of science fiction whose popularity lies not in its positing of otherworld, but rather, he argues, in its <span class="lightEmphasis">style</span>. In an provocative (and, I would argue, corrective) analysis of <span class="filmtitle">The Matrix</span>, Punday highlights the limits of a simplistic application of Jean Baudrillard’s theory of simulation to a film which is taken to epitomise the apparent postmodern malaise of a media-controlled hyperreality. While <span class="booktitle">Simulacra and Simulation</span> is cited in <span class="filmtitle">The Matrix</span>, the computer-generated alternate reality from which the film’s central protagonists seek to escape is <span class="lightEmphasis">not</span> coterminous with Baudrillard’s model of simulation as “an expansion of media representation as part of a capitalism in which use value evaporates under the pressure of omnipresent exchange value” (130). This literalizing and misreading of Baudrillard’s theory is ironic, Punday argues, “since so much of the appeal of the film depends on its spectacular action sequences and its innovative use of computer-generated imagining [sic] (CGI) technology” (131). The emphasis on visual style extends to the leather clothing and social settings favoured by the protagonists, which appears to establish “certain types of emotional links between the futuristic world of the film and the definition of the stylish in late-“90s America” (133). Punday argues that this shift in science fiction from speculative futurity to a style that is symptomatic of the text’s present is particularly apparent in cyberpunk writing. While the works of writers such as William Gibson engage with (and extrapolate from) contemporaneous technological developments, their popular and critical appeal appears to lie in their distinctive and unconventional verbal style (135-9). Punday suggests that “the foregrounding of style as reflection of the broader cultural conditions” extends beyond cyberpunk to the discussion of postmodern culture more generally: “many of the most popular statements about postmodernity treat the characteristics of contemporary texts as symptoms of changing social conditions” (141). While such a “symptomatic” reading is fraught with problems, it enables commentators to engage in discussions of popular culture “without recourse to particular disciplinary procedures”, and “without any formal framework for defining their aesthetics” (145). Consequently, the definition of fictionality as a style is located on the (now uncertain) boundary between literary institutions and popular culture.</p>
<p>Taking us further into the realm of popular culture, Punday’s fifth strand derives from role-playing games, which are “fundamentally narrative in nature” but “depend on a very particular understanding of fictionality” (152). Role-playing games not only allow individuals to take an active role in their respective encompassing narratives, but are also “directly connected to various subgenres of contemporary popular writing” (158). Indeed, Punday speculates, “part of the pleasure of these games is organizing and combining the various stories and subgenres that the players enjoy” (166). The definition of fictionality as role-playing is therefore distinctive not only in its distance from traditional institutional understandings, but also as “a form of cultural practice that allows players to intervene productively into popular genres of fiction” (167). Punday sees similar notions of intervention and agency at play in possible-worlds theory, which emphasises the objects that make up a narrative world “in order to ask the question, what do we (readers, critics, fans) <span class="lightEmphasis">do</span> with the stories we love?” (168). In a cogent summary of the work of Marie-Laure Ryan, Lubomír Doležel and others, Punday proposes that by “paying less attention to texture and more to entities that make up their worlds, theorists interested in fictional worlds are able to make cross-textual comparisons more easily” (174). By defining a fictional text as an <span class="lightEmphasis">assemblage</span> of objects rather than an instantiation of literary codes and conventions, fictional-worlds theory and role-playing games appear to reject structuralist and institutional understandings of fictionality, which would seek to restrict and arrest the free-play of their respective theoretical and creative engagements with texts (175-6).</p>
<p>Having highlighted his five strands of fictionality, Punday proceeds to examine the interaction of these competing definitions in electronic writing, which he sees as being “positioned on the boundary between several competing institutions that promise to legitimate it” (178). Punday attributes the uncertainty regarding key terms like “reading, text, and creativity” in discussions of electronic writing to the interface of different “protocols” in these works. Drawing on Lacan’s notion of <span class="lightEmphasis">suture</span> (defined as the binding point in an ideological field that gives the whole coherence), he interprets Jim Andrews’ <span class="gametitle">Asteroids</span> as binding together “the features we expect of games and literary works by addressing the activity demanded by each” (183).<cite class="note" id="note_4">Punday’s understanding of <span class="lightEmphasis">suture</span> derives from Ernesto Laclau and Chantal Mouffe, as cited in Žižek (1989).</cite> Such sutures suggest that static institutional categorisations of the work itself should be replaced by the reader/player’s more mutable and experiential understanding of their own engagement and activity (184). Punday then briefly traces his five strands of fictionality through five electronic works: <span class="lightEmphasis">myth</span> in the computer game <span class="gametitle">Black &amp; White</span> (2001); <span class="lightEmphasis">archive</span> in M.D. Coverley’s multimedia hypertext <span class="gametitle">Calfia</span> (2000); <span class="lightEmphasis">lying</span> in Talan Memmott’s <span class="gametitle">Lolli’s Apartment</span>; <span class="lightEmphasis">style</span> in Wes Chapman’s <span class="gametitle">Turning In</span> (1997); and <span class="lightEmphasis">assemblage</span> in Shelley Jackson’s <span class="gametitle">Patchwork Girl</span> (1995). While Punday’s commentary here is undoubtedly intriguing, I felt that the brevity of the respective analyses prevents them from achieving complete clarity or conclusiveness (although this may be due in part to my relatively recent foray into this field). In fact, I found the close analyses of the various works and games to be less compelling than Punday’s characterisation of fictionality in electronic writing more generally. For example, his argument that “the literary framework for thinking about fictionality is not immediately or fundamentally changed by the introduction of new technologies” provides a welcome corrective - or at least counterweight - to the notion that the future of reading and of culture is inextricably tied to the book as a physical artefact (216-7). Even here, however, his approach may be somewhat problematic for those whose interest lies in understanding the <span class="lightEmphasis">specific</span> potential and problems of electronic writing, as his defence and description of the form is largely based on its perceived continuity with, rather than radical difference, more traditional literary forms.</p>
<p>Punday’s sceptical and somewhat irreverent comments on the “apocalyptic” equation of electronic writing with the dissolution of cultural life as we know it is typical of the tone of his work as a whole. As I have noted above, he offers compelling counterarguments to engrained positions and received opinions, forcing the reader into an active re-evaluation of key concepts (such as “postmodern” and “simulation”) which are in danger of degenerating from critical clarity into cliché. The scope of Punday’s argument is striking, as he ranges an analytical alphabet from Adorno to Žižek, and employs diverse and difficult critical concepts with remarkable clarity and fluency. However, there are certain points where the centrifugal forces and ambitions of the analysis appear to strain at the limits of the restrictive structuring motif. For example, although the grouping of Walker and Warhol under the <span class="lightEmphasis">archive</span> heading highlights certain salient parallels between their respective projects, the absence of any commentary on their markedly different contexts (informed by social, cultural, gender and other factors) seems somewhat puzzling. In short, their textual contiguity here does not entirely dispel the sense of their contextual incongruity. Such isolated reservations notwithstanding, there is no doubting Punday’s achievement in constructing an argument which not only addresses the issue of fictionality from an incisive new perspective, but is also of enormous interdisciplinary relevance. Whether read on its own or alongside (and against) alternative models, Punday’s account of fictionality is, like fiction itself, essential.<cite class="note" id="note_5">It is particularly productive to compare Punday’s account of fictionality with Richard Walsh’s <span class="booktitle">The Rhetoric of Fictionality</span> (2007). Fictionality, in Walsh’s view, is best understood not as “an ontological category” but as “a communicative resource”; it is “neither a boundary between worlds, nor a frame dissociating the author from the discourse, but a contextual assumption by the reader, prompted by the manifest information that the authorial discourse is offered as fiction” (36).</cite></p>
<h2>Works Cited and Mentioned</h2>
<p>Andrews, Jim. <span class="gametitle">Asteroids</span>. <a href="http://www.vispo.com/asteroids/index.htm">http://www.vispo.com/asteroids/index.htm</a>.</p>
<p>Barth, John. <span class="booktitle">The Friday Book: Essays and Other Nonfiction</span>. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1984.</p>
<p>Baudrillard, Jean. <span class="booktitle">Simulacra and Simulation</span>. Translated by Sheila Faria Glaser. Ann Arbor: University of Michigan Press, 1994.</p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Black &amp; White</span>. CD-ROM. Redwood City, CA: Electronic Arts, 2001.</p>
<p>Chapman, Wes. <span class="booktitle">Turning In</span>. Diskette. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1997.</p>
<p>Chesterton, G.K. “A Defence of Penny Dreadfuls.” <span class="booktitle">The Defendant</span>. 1901. Wildside Press, 2005.</p>
<p>Cohn, Dorrit. “Signposts of Fictionality: A Narratological Perspective.” <span class="booktitle">Poetics Today</span> 11.4 (1990): 775-804.</p>
<p>Coverly, M.D. <span class="booktitle">Calfia</span>. CD-ROM. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 2000.</p>
<p>Derrida, Jacques. <span class="booktitle">Archive Fever: A Freudian Impression</span>. Translated by Eric Prenowitz. Chicago: Chicago University Press, 1996.</p>
<p>Doležel, Lubomír. <span class="booktitle">Heterocosmica: Fiction and Possible Worlds</span>. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 1998.</p>
<p>Jackson, Shelley. <span class="booktitle">Patchwork Girl</span>. CD-ROM. Watertown, MA: Eastgate Systems, 1995.</p>
<p>Katz, Steve. <span class="booktitle">The Exaggerations of Peter Prince</span>. New York: Holt, Rinehart and Winston, 1968.</p>
<p>Memmott, Talon. <span class="booktitle">Lolli’s Apartment</span>. <a href="http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/memmott.html">http://www.heelstone.com/meridian/memmott.html</a>.</p>
<p>Nemerov, Howard. <span class="booktitle">Journal of the Fictive Life</span>. 1965. Chicago: University of Chicago Press, 1981.</p>
<p>Prince, Gerald. “Narratology, Narrative, and Meaning.” <span class="booktitle">Poetics Today</span> 12.3 (1991): 543-552.</p>
<p>Punday, Daniel. <span class="booktitle">Five Strands of Fictionality: The Institutional Construction of Contemporary American Fiction</span>. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2010.</p>
<p>Ryan, Marie-Laure. <span class="booktitle">Narrative as Virtual Reality: Immersion and Interactivity in Literature and Electronic Media</span>. Baltimore: John Hopkins University Press, 2001.</p>
<p>—. <span class="booktitle">Possible Worlds, Artificial Intelligence, and Narrative Theory</span>. Bloomington: Indiana University Press, 1991.</p>
<p>Sorrentino, Gilbert. <span class="booktitle">Imaginative Qualities of Actual Things</span>. 1971. Normal, IL: Dalkey Archive, 1991.</p>
<p>Walker, Alice. <span class="booktitle">In Search of Our Mothers’ Gardens: Womanist Prose</span>. San Diego: Harvest, 1984.</p>
<p>Walsh, Richard. <span class="booktitle">The Rhetoric of Fictionality: Narrative Theory and the Idea of Fiction</span>. Columbus, OH: Ohio State University Press, 2007.</p>
<p>Warhol, Andy. <span class="booktitle">The Philosophy of Andy Warhol (From A to B and Back Again)</span>. San Diego: Harcourt, 1975.</p>
<p>Žižek, Slavoj. <span class="booktitle">The Sublime Object of Ideology</span>. London: Verso, 1989.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/fictionality">fictionality</a>, <a href="/tags/style">style</a>, <a href="/tags/archive">archive</a>, <a href="/tags/myth">myth</a>, <a href="/tags/lying">lying</a>, <a href="/tags/assemblage">assemblage</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1342 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comMultimedia Textuality; or, an Oxymoron for the Presenthttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/illuminated
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Katherine Acheson</div>
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</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2006-11-11</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p><span class="epigraph"><span class="lightEmphasis">A multimedia version of this essay is available <a class="outbound" href="http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~koa/mcgann/mcgann1.html">here</a>.</span></span></p>
<p><span class="booktitle">Radiant Textuality</span> collects Jerome McGann’s work about digital technology and literary studies written (and published) between 1993 and 2001. The chapters are episodes in the history of McGann’s engagement with the intellectual opportunities offered by the interaction between computer power, digital technology and literary studies. The earliest are preoccupied with defining the impact of computer tools on literary studies, particularly historical and editorial work. The middle section reverses the question: what can the objects of literary studies - recursive, cumulative, difference-generating, perpetual motion machines - teach digital technology?</p>
<p>The concluding section imagines a convergence of the previous two: how can computer technology be used to create generative and multiplicitous space within which to exercise critical intelligence - within which to instantiate the imaginative energy existing between works of art, other works of art, their audiences and creators, and the many cultures in which they are manifest?</p>
<p>These essays have been widely available on the web for several years, and most everyone who needs to read them will already have read them. The collection is nonetheless valuable and interesting. As an intellectual autobiography (for much of the discursive mode is personal, literally self-centred) it crafts an image of the productivity of failure, at least when experienced by a mind as nimble and a body as energetic as McGann’s. As a record of the period between the epiphanic moment at which the importance of digital technology to literary scholarship was perceived, and the end of the first decade of the implementation of the mechanics of that epiphany, it is of great anthropological and historical value, and will remain so for many years. Most of all, however, as with all of McGann’s work, these essays point to the shape of the decades to come for our profession. More so than any other single critic or scholar in the last twenty years (at least for me), McGann’s work - from <span class="booktitle">A Critique of Modern Textual Criticism</span> right through to his present work on <a class="outbound" href="http://www.nines.org/">NINES</a> and the Ivanhoe Game (more on those in a minute) - has pointed to the future of work in the discipline of literary studies. What he says (ah, and what he does not say) in <span class="booktitle">Radiant Textuality</span> are important starting points for all of us committed to that discipline and its future vigour.</p>
<p>Take, for example, McGann’s understanding of the centrality - and the deficiencies - of text-tagging, and of the standardization represented by the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.tei-c.org/">Text Encoding Initiative</a>. While he exaggerates when he implies that tagging will be as much the fulcrum of our practice as reading, say, or writing (see 68), he is right to suggest that tagged-texts, and the interrelations between texts, other texts, and contexts established by tags, will provide the research base for most of what goes on in literary scholarship for the forseeable future. And he is right that tagged text and the tools we can use to analyze it have the potential to transform our practice, although not only in a positive way. As he writes, because TEI “treats the humanities corpus - typically, works of imagination - as informational structure, it ipso facto violates some of the most basic reading practices of the humanities community, scholarly as well as popular” (139), it has the very real possibility of flattening and stripping texts and their relational fields: “The recursive patterns that constitute an essential - probably the essential - feature of poetry and imaginative works in general cannot be marked, least of all captured, by SGML and its offspring” (172). It will never be necessary for all scholars to tag texts - but it will be necessary for all critics to understand how tagging works, what its limitations are. And it will be fitting for us each to have an informed opinion on how those limitations affect what we know and how we know it.</p>
<p>Equally important to our future is McGann’s work on the development of a concept and a tool for the tagging or annotating of images. While his own work on this topic has been stimulated by the problems presented by the multi-modal texts included in the Rosetti Archive, and by the bibliographer’s perception that all texts have material and aesthetic qualities best represented through densely inscribed images, its importance will be felt across the scholarly community in the future, as images and their relations with text come to predominate not only in our research base, but in the form our research takes in dissemination. Inote - the image-tagging tool developed by McGann’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/">IATH</a> team - will not solve these problems. What would it make, for instance, of the use of <a class="outbound" href="http://www.rossettiarchive.org">Rosetti</a>’s work that I have made in the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~koa/mcgann/mcgann1.html">multimedia version</a> of this review? And how to account for the effect of the images in relation to the text which is itself part of the layout of the ‘pages’? - but again, it is one leaf in the book that we will all be working on in the future, whether we want to or not. As with text-tagging, the shortcomings of Inote (“Our work with Inote shows how far one might go - and it is pretty far, after all - to integrate an SGML approach to picture markup and analysis. But the limitations of such an approach are also painfully clear” (97)) are as important to our future work as are its capabilities, and McGann makes sure that we understand their significance.</p>
<p>But there is something missing in McGann’s invention of the future, the multimedia version of this review is intended to be a small offering to the questions that are peripheral to his vision but must be central to the oncoming of digital scholarship. McGann mentions the importance of design to the future of digital scholarship several times in the course of this book: he says, for example, that “the next generation of literary and aesthetic theorists who will most matter are people who will be at least as involved with making things as with writing text” (RT 19). He has played with Photoshop - once, at a friend’s house (97) - and mentions this several times in the course of the book, giving credit to the program’s filters for stimulating the idea of deformation as a fundamental critical manoeuvre. But he has no evident design capability, and little interest in the creative and semiotic potential of multimedia in scholarship and interpretation.</p>
<p>The most signal failure that the book notes is the re-design of the <a class="outbound" href="http://www.rossettiarchive.org/newdesign/index.html"><span class="booktitle">Rossetti Archive</span> interface</a>, a problem that remains unsolved as I write. To be sure, the intransigence of this problem is a symptom of the clash between the complexity of the materials the archive contains, and the deceptive, even dubious, simplicity we expect from web-based information. But teams of technicians and the brain power of top computer scientists haunt the wings of McGann’s productions, while there is no mention of a professional designer, or even of the kind of aesthetic and technical training and the tools which are needed to produce both the usability and the graphic quality such projects require. The proposal for the Rossetti re-design, like the Ivanhoe game website, McGann’s <a class="outbound" href="http://www.iath.virginia.edu/%7Ejjm2f/index.html">own site</a>, and the NINES site, were clearly designed by well-intentioned but under-trained and inexperienced amateurs. And despite the fact that Johanna Drucker once introduced an image to the Ivanhoe gamespace to show that it could be done, all of the imaginative play that McGann so gloriously shows is possible within digital space and using digital tools is starkly verbal and relentlessly textual. Even the cover of <span class="booktitle">Radiant Textuality</span> is just that - radiant text, a rendition of fragments of the book’s text, tagged. One hopes that the future in McGann’s thinking includes the extraordinary, n-dimensional, ‘pataphysical challenges of multimedia scholarship and dissemination, something beyond a statement that the interface is important and Photoshop is cool. One’s impression is that he is stretched as far as a person can be, balancing the spinning plates of several disciplines at once, and this is not a request that he become a designer. But it would be good for the future he heralds for McGann to invite scholar-designers into the nucleus of the invention of the brave new world we inhabit.</p>
<h2>Works Cited</h2>
<p>McGann, Jerome. <span class="booktitle">Radiant Textuality: Literature After the World Wide Web</span>. New York, NY; Houndmills, UK: Palgrave Macmillan, 2001.</p>
<p>—. “<a class="outbound" href="http://www.nines.org/about/readings.html">Culture and Technology: The Way We Live Now, What Is To Be Done?</a>” Paper delivered at the University of Chicago, April 23, 2004. Dec. 27, 2004.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/acheson">Acheson</a>, <a href="/tags/mcgann">McGann</a>, <a href="/tags/rossetti">Rossetti</a>, <a href="/tags/nines">nines</a>, <a href="/tags/ivanhoe">Ivanhoe</a>, <a href="/tags/design">design</a>, <a href="/tags/multimedia">multimedia</a>, <a href="/tags/archive">archive</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1165 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comIntroduction - Illuminated Criticismhttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/criticalecologies/rhetorical
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Andrew McMurry</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">2006-11-11</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>In her <a class="outbound" href="http://www.arts.uwaterloo.ca/~koa/mcgann/mcgann1.html">multimedia review</a> of <span class="booktitle">Radiant Textuality</span> (note that a <a class="internal" href="../criticalecologies/illuminated">plain text version</a> is also available on <span class="booktitle">ebr</span>), Katherine Acheson poses a rhetorical question to Inote, the image-tagging tool developed by Virginia’s Institute for Advanced Technology in the Humanities and championed by Jerome McGann: “What would it make… of the use of Rossetti’s works that I have made here? And how to account for the effect of the images in relation to the text which is itself part of the layout of the ‘pages’?” It is this tension between word and image that Acheson says McGann has yet to address in his vital work on text and image markup initiatives - work which has been prompted by artist-writers like Blake and Rossetti, whose own corpuses are exemplary of the word-image tension. In other words, it is the question of “design” that McGann avoids raising.</p>
<p>But perhaps for good reasons. It is quite clear that digital editing tools, such as those McGann has worked assiduously to bring to the attention of the critical enterprise, will foster exciting new arrangements, juxtapositions, concatenations, and deformations of the literary-textual landscape. But effective integration of text and image is not yet possible on the web, which requires the segregation of text from image if the text is to be made available as text. (Case in point: <span class="booktitle">electronic book review</span>!) So the challenge of design, beyond simple choices of fonts and layout, remains the province of designers, while literary scholars, according to McGann, should simply familiarize themselves with the new text and image handling techniques, which can make immediate and palpable differences in the way they access, manipulate, and most importantly, interpret, the archives of literary history.</p>
<p>Yet what good are image and text handling tools, Acheson seems to ask, if we don’t make them in a way that opens up space for a design aesthetic? It is all very well to have hammers and nails, but what are we going to build? To borrow Lev Manovich’s terms, New Media is not only about poring over databases but about constructing narratives. In Acheson’s view, then, the design challenge - and in particular, the challenge of operationalizing the word-image dialectic - must be taken up at the same time as we deploy the new tools of text and image tagging. A daunting challenge, to be sure: what new fluencies must we acquire to work in the digital humanities? The language of audio, video, animation, and painting? Even if one decides never to invest in learning Flash or Dreamweaver, the multimediatization of the written word suggests that a working knowledge of design theory could at least help one know what one was looking at (and whether it was worth looking at).</p>
<p>So what to make of Acheson’s illuminated critique itself? For wordsmiths, images are pleasant distractions or even, occasionally, dangerous supplements; in any case, they are best ignored once we begin the heady process of mentally tagging and bagging text. But as visual beings, we cannot ignore these chopped, cropped, and photoshopped images that surround and suffuse Acheson’s text, putting twists on the plain sense of words via, for example, a lobate Fibonacci spiral. As critics, we expect words to carry most of the semantic freight, but these images put a finger on the scale of meaning, and we are hard-pressed to know exactly what they add up to. Re-reading and re-viewing become important: crudely put, images don’t give it up like cheap whores. As with Rossetti’s demurely beautiful women refusing to meet the artist’s (and our) gaze, these images refuse to align with any textual entreaties. We finish the review knowing more than we started but with the feeling that much has been left unsaid, or rather, unseen. Properly so, for a single image will effect a semiotic eruption beyond what words can describe, let alone emulate. It is this residue impervious to verbal rendering that makes “the visual” so enigmatic, even as it has become the central meaning-making mode of our time, which is a scopic regime of collage and pastiche, born upon the severing of the word-thing umbilicus. Acheson’s illuminated critique fits this time and, perhaps, models the future of our critical practices.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/mcmurry">McMurry</a>, <a href="/tags/acheson">Acheson</a>, <a href="/tags/blake">blake</a>, <a href="/tags/rossetti">Rossetti</a>, <a href="/tags/mcgann">McGann</a>, <a href="/tags/archive">archive</a>, <a href="/tags/design">design</a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1163 at http://www.electronicbookreview.comThe Flights of A821: dearchiving the proceedings of a birdsonghttp://www.electronicbookreview.com/thread/imagenarrative/uncaged
<div class="field field-name-field-author field-type-node-reference field-label-hidden clearfix">
<div class="markup">by</div>
<div class="field-items">
<div class="field-item even">Marta Werner</div>
</div>
</div>
<div class="field field-name-field-publication-date field-type-datetime field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><span class="date-display-single">1997-12-30</span></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-source-url field-type-link-field field-label-inline clearfix"><div class="field-label">Source URL:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"></div></div></div><div class="field field-name-body field-type-text-with-summary field-label-hidden"><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><p>A <a class="outbound" href="http://www.altx.com/ebr/ebr6/6werner/6wern.htm">contribution</a> to the original Image + Narrative cluster, Winter 97/98.</p>
</div></div></div><div class="field field-name-field-tags field-type-taxonomy-term-reference field-label-above"><div class="field-label">Tags:&nbsp;</div><div class="field-items"><div class="field-item even"><a href="/tags/emily-dickinson">emily dickinson</a>, <a href="/tags/marta-werner">marta werner</a>, <a href="/tags/image">image</a>, <a href="/tags/narrative">narrative</a>, <a href="/tags/archive">archive</a>, <a href="/tags"></a></div></div></div>Tue, 31 Jan 2012 16:25:05 +0000EBR Administrator1112 at http://www.electronicbookreview.com